Is Your SaaS Pricing Strategy Ready for 2020?

Anna Mroczkowski
Anna Mroczkowski
December 20th, 2019
Estimated read time: 4 minutes, 43 seconds

Is your SaaS pricing strategy ready to take on 2020?

Price Intelligently reports SaaS companies only spend 6 hours on their pricing strategy in the entire history of their business. It’s clear that pricing is an overlooked component of the SaaS sales cycle. When strategically coordinated, pricing can pack a powerful punch to boost opportunity to close rates. 

Updating your SaaS pricing strategy for 2020 can be a daunting task. What tactics are hot, and what tactics are not? The last thing your SaaS pricing strategy needs is an outdated approach that adds nothing to your sales process.

To help you get started, here are our expert-identified SaaS pricing strategies to leave and launch heading into 2020. 

Leave: Your Website’s Pricing Page

Begin your SaaS pricing strategy refresh with a relaunch to the front lines of your pricing: your website. Your website is your prospect’s first impression of your company and product — and pricing acts as your first conversation with prospects. Your pricing page is one of the most critical pieces of your website: it needs to be clear and engaging with a compelling call to action

If prospects view your pricing page as hard to navigate, overly complex or outdated, it’s a poor reflection of your company and product. To avoid this, carve out time in 2020 to update your pricing page with clear information and powerful messaging that drives more leads. You can (and should) bid farewell to your current pricing page, and start the new decade with a fresh page that really starts the conversation. 

“Your pricing page is one of the most important pages on your website for a reason: it’s where customers go to begin the purchase decision process. This makes it critical that your pricing page reflects the experience customers can expect from working with you.” 

— Meg Kucey, Director of Customer Experience, FastSpring

Launch: A New Strategy for Enterprise Deals

Once your pricing page is upgraded, it’s time to examine the buying experience prospects are having. In a self-serve model, prospects are empowered by buying experiences they can navigate with ease. This experience typically allows prospects to compare and contrast options, evaluate different price points, and consider how they can grow with your product. This process is backed by psychology that explains how to create sales processes that convert. 

But is this buying experience emulated in your enterprise sales process? If your enterprise pricing strategy looks nothing like your self-serve model, your prospects are likely not having the buying experience they want. 2020 is the perfect time to launch a new sales experience that will empower, not confuse, enterprise prospects.

“Most SaaS companies know how to navigate public pricing, and use some level of buying psychology to execute really clever strategies. When it comes to enterprise deals, this strategy tends to get thrown out the window. The best enterprise experiences incorporate the same psychology that self-serve models use.”

— Greg Toner, CFO, SalesRight

Leave: Hidden Friction in your Sales Process

Everyone wants to believe their enterprise sales process is working as efficiently as possible — but pricing can cause friction at multiple points of the sales process. It’s one of the only points of conversation broached in first discussions and lasting until a contract is signed. As it’s such a critical component, it needs a critical eye to ensure it is functioning as efficiently as possible.

If your prospects are…  

  • Re-asking questions on pricing points discussed in previous conversations
  • Requiring clarification on features and add-ons
  • Requesting follow-up conversations with decision makers so you can re-explain or clarify pricing points

…Your pricing isn’t standing on its own, and is adding friction to your sales process. It’s time to leave friction behind once and for all, and enter the new decade with a truly efficient process.

“SaaS pricing is naturally complex — but that doesn’t make friction inevitable. When pricing is easily understood and championed, the entire sales process benefits. It’s an overlooked piece of the sales process that can remove friction on multiple fronts.”

— Taylor Bond, Account Executive at FastSpring

Launch: Live SaaS Pricing Proposals

One of the biggest hurdles for SaaS sellers to overcome in 2020 is streamlining the enterprise sales process. The last thing sales reps need is repetitive processes, like creating and communicating complex pricing and proposals, taking them away from selling. 

An easy way to accelerate the enterprise sales process is by using a live pricing proposal. Live pricing proposals clearly display complex SaaS pricing, giving prospects the ultimate buying experience while informing follow up strategies with real-time analytics on their interactions. When sales reps are empowered with live pricing proposals, they save more time and improve their conversion rates (see how live pricing proposals changed these SaaS companies). It’s the perfect strategy to kick-start Q1 of 2020 with.

“In late-stage deals, sales reps have to deal with silence from prospects when going back-and-forth on pricing. A good SaaS pricing strategy outlines how to navigate this silence with follow-ups, but the best SaaS pricing strategies embrace this silence by using live tools that show them what prospects are actually thinking.” 

— Bill Wilson, Director of Product, FastSpring

To prepare your SaaS pricing strategy for 2020, take these four steps:

  1. Refresh your website’s pricing page
  2. Launch a new enterprise experience
  3. Identify hidden friction in your sales process
  4. Harness the power of live pricing proposals

FastSpring Interactive Quotes can accomplish this and more — click here to see how we help sales reps increase their conversion rates and save 10+ hours every month. 

Anna Mroczkowski

Anna Mroczkowski

Anna is the Community Engagement Specialist at FastSpring. When Anna isn’t busy writing blog content and scrolling through social media for FastSpring, you can find her streaming TV shows, eating oysters, and dancing around her apartment in a matching sweatsuit listening to Savage Garden.